0 beautiful things

Let us begin with the I, the proverbial I, the first person who may or may not be me and who may or may not be you but the I that we all know and are familiar with. And we’ll take a scene which could be the scene from a novel or a book or a painting or even a dream in someone’s head at night which doesn’t necessarily have a landscape or light or a sense of beginning or end jus the here which is before you and the now which is in the present.

Trying to acquire the beautiful things is always difficult, constantly futile but the effort like the stone which Sisyphus pushed up that hill until it rolled down again is one that you are familiar with. And the beautiful thins themselves are always ambiguous and only beautiful when they are distant and on their own. The garden that lies before you absent of butterflies, the music which you are wanting to hear and then once you have listened has disappeared, the lover which fades as the dawn light appears outside your window, the curtains muffling the sound of morning birds.
You must know the right language to use and that once you speak about the finishing it is over like the end of a sentence you put a period after or some other form of punctuation provided the grammar dictates that you must implement some sort of question mark, exclamation, colon or period. And then it is right there but not here, behind you like the constant which is here but then slips past you the way the rocks which will one day become meteors when they penetrate the atmosphere slip by through the abyss.
And now let us imagine a young child and her father in the middle of someplace that could be anywhere on a map. And the time is evening or night or perhaps early dawn when the sun is slumbering on the other side of the planet where there are other children and fathers and mothers enjoying the bright sky. But now go back to the child and the father and the dark sky above them, looking up at the stars. The child is the I and the father is the I and somehow they could both be you or someone you know. A finger points upward at the brief light that slips into the darkness and shines bright for a moment. A light that as once in a tiny stone drifting in the cavern of space and brightens for a moment the grass around them.

But no, never mind the children, the parents and the wanderers or the astronauts in the spacecraft. Never mind the birds singing outside the window or the grass beneath the feet – your feet – as you brace the air crisp as a breeze off the Chicago waters. Forget the circle of the air around you and the earth and the air above the atmosphere and the circle of the sun and the astronauts and birds both breathing their circle of air and the hand of the father hanging onto the child as she reaches out for the brilliant pebbles in the night sky.

--Perci W., 30